Oct

Heads Up Big Sub

Barnard just gets us. To help cope with the tendency to eat our feelings the midterm season, the annual Big Sub event will take place tonight starting at 7pm on Lehman Lawn at Barnard. Whispering secret sorcerers say that you should arrive around 6:45pm to secure your spot in the line for the sub. This year’s sub will be 714 feet long to celebrate the class of 2014. That’s a shit load of tomatoes.

WAIT THERE’S MORE! The theme of this year’s Big Sub is Willy Wonka and the Sub Factory. That means golden tickets will be placed under select portions of the sub with prizes to be won. Bwog can barely contain our excitement.

Sometimes, a dominant ideology is used as a subterfuge in order to serve the ruling classes. This mega-sub, portrayed as the socialist meal par excellence ("1 foot for you!"), reminds me of the myth of Procrustes.

Procrustes, you might recall, was a Greek host notable for his egalitarian ways. He had his place, invited people over, and had a bed that fit his guests more or less exactly, regardless of their height. How did he accomplish this? Was his bed magical? No, he either mutilated the guest or stretched him/her out. As a result, the same bed fit his different guests equally, and nobody got more or less of this bed than anyone else. This was communism at it's finest, one can say! It was also an act of subversion, and was really capitalism at it's finest.

Egalitarianism is the idea that we are all equal, and the sub above elegantly captures this notion, in having 714 foot-longs,it demonstrates that food can be "democratic," as all who attend receive, theoretically, their equal portions. Art can be political, of course, and so can culinary public art displays like this one. Here, each foot-long represents, or is, the "portion," which for one person can be overwhelming and for another can be minimal. If you are a person with a large appetite, you know that eating two burritos at Chipotle can be an easy and quick task (for this is a self-evident truth). If you are weak, it sounds overwhelming, of course. The same, one can argue, would apply to foot-longs. So do not partake, unless you want to promote the system that is oppressing you!

What does it mean that all get the same when all receive it differently? It means that equality of opportunity is a sham unless society is homogeneous. We can say "have this" and distribute it equally regardless of who we are, call this equal opportunity, but if we do not account for difference, inequality will always be perpetuated. This is the myth that capitalism does not want you to hear, and it is the myth of our global era, to put it lightly.

We see the proletariat and say, "Do not complain! What you suffer was in your contract! You agreed to it" But is this not a sham? Read Durkheim, young children. The contract had to be accepted because if it wasn't, one would have to starve. There would, after all, be someone else to agree to it out of desperation. This is the sublime subversiveness of capitalism. "Take your freedom," but know that you are only helping your master.

You will see an organization say that it is equal opportunity, but strict equality, as we saw with Procrustes, is not always for the best of the individual, let alone the community. Some of us require special attention, extra help, compensation for wrongs, etc. The idea that all deserve the same, regardless of our historical situation, is a sham that serves the interest of those we serve. This fact, though presented under the subtext of a sandwich, is in fact most serious, and I hope to bring it to the conscience of all of those who are unaware, or rather, who have been made unaware.

We are served a sub, then, but are only serving the servers of the sub. The twisted ideology at work is one which dehumanizes us, which decides to see in us not the face of another, a human, but the face of a tool, a means and nothing but a means to the end of profit, to our enslavement, the slow road to our becoming so wholly other, that we serve those above us as holy others. This is the ultimate parody.

The way we become so servile, and desperate, sinks us into a hole wherein the oppression is, of course, further perpetuated, and the gap between the ruling and the working class grows more and more. The result is an oligarchy, and this is capitalism's final gift to humanity before the apocalypse, what we all receive is an oligarchy masked as a democracy. So dehumanized we have become, so uneducated, so lacking in critical thought, we vote only for the puppets propped up by leaders and corporations. We believe there is no discrimination, we believe we are in the land of the free, when all we really do is wallow in the mud created by our oppression.

Our despair is Kierkegaardian, for no one is our guardian. We are unaware. Our conscience numbed by advertisements, false promises, and other myths. Who, then, represents us? Our government will represent the wealthiest and most powerful, while we become commodities, slaves, inhuman, alienated, etc.

The sub, above, is, to drive the point home, a picture of this condition.

How can we save ourselves? The polysyllabic logorrhea spewed by our elitist humanities departments, what we may call the discourse of the academy is useless for effecting any serious change, which means change must come from the hoi polloi itself, those whom the ruling class erroneously deem the "sub-human." They know not what awaits them, however. This is the beauty of revolution. The etymology of this word is one of "rolling back," and it is in taking a new role, that change is brought forth. The sub, then, requires new heroes, whether Italian or not.

The way out of this condition, then, starts from the bottom. No building with shaky foundations can last, so we must shake it from below and hope for radical yet pacific change. Thomas Nagel noted that the least controversial claim one can make in political theory is that we do not live in a just world. We can start change by becoming aware of the masks inherent in capitalism, democracy, etc. by reading all these ideologies as ideologies of subversion against the political sub-alterns that we all are.